“This is not only the largest political mobilization in Polish political history. It is without a doubt the largest political gathering in the world today”boasted Donald Tusk at the head of a gigantic white and red procession in Warsaw, Sunday 1er october. According to the town hall of the Polish capital, led by Rafal Trzaskowski, a close friend, a member of the same Democratic Party, nearly a million people marched in the afternoon, while the online news site Onet suggests 600,000 to 800,000 participants.
Former Polish Prime Minister (from 2007 to 2014) Donald Tusk, at the head of a coalition credited with around 28% in the legislative elections of October 15 and led by his party, the Civic Platform (PO), hopes that this tour de force will bring him back up in the polls. A growing hope in view of the mobilization, which exceeds the previous march of June 4, which had already brought together 500,000 people in the capital and had allowed the coalition to reach 30% of the voting intentions.
However, overtaking the national conservatives of Law and Justice (PiS) seems to be a challenge. Jaroslaw Kaczynski’s party, in power since 2015, leads the race with 36% of the vote, according to voting projections. The whole challenge, for the liberal coalition, therefore consists of not stealing votes from the two electoral alliances essential to hope to be able to govern: New Left and Third Way, located around 9% each. Except that Third Way continues to flirt dangerously with the 8% threshold required for coalitions to enter the Diet, the lower house of the Polish Parliament. Which would mean an almost assured victory for PiS.
Against “hate language”
On Sunday, the hundreds of thousands of people who crisscrossed Warsaw’s main streets wanted to believe in political change on October 15. “When Tusk was in power, we had the rule of law and the Poles were not pitted against each other,” underlines Krystyna, a 65-year-old retiree who lives in Radom, 100 km south of Warsaw. This trained chemist, with a heart plastered to her cheek, came in a bus chartered by Donald Tusk’s party. She assures that the volunteers were even more numerous than four months ago. “I knew communism but I have never seen such language of hatred as that used by PiS”, laments this Polish woman, who fears leaving the European Union if the democratic opposition does not win.
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